1905027 - There should be a Keyboard shortcut for the AI chat sidebar

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: Keyboard Navigation, enhancement, P1)

Description

[Rares Doghi, Desktop QA]

Found in

• Nightly 129.0a1

Affected versions

• Nightly 129.0a1 (2024-06-27)

Affected platforms

• All

Steps to reproduce

1. Reach about:preferences#experimental page.
2. Enable the AI Chat integration.
3. Select the ChatGP AI provider and login.

Expected result

• There should be a keyboard shortcut for the AI Chat sidebar similar to Ctrl B/H for the Bookmarks/History sidebar

Actual result

• There is no keyboard shortcut for the AI chat sidebar.

Regression range
Not a regression.

Comment 1

[Ed Lee :Mardak]

ania mentioned finding an appropriate 3-key shortcut. some complication might come from chatbot only conditionally available, i.e., requires enabling

Comment 2

[Ania]

Modifier + Shift + I seems to be available.

Francesco, I wonder if you have any concerns about using this shortcut from a localization standpoint?

Comment 3

[Francesco Lodolo [:flod]]

Not that I can think of, as i should be available on most keyboard layouts.

P.S. for localization questions related to Firefox, :bolsson is a good point of contact these days.

Comment 4

[Ed Lee :Mardak]

ania, should this keyboard shortcut enable chabot if not already enabled from firefox labs?

Comment 5

[Ed Lee :Mardak]

Attachment: Bug 1905027 - There should be a Keyboard shortcut for the AI chat sidebar r=ngrato!

Toggle chatbot with accel-shift-i.

Comment 6

[Ania]

Thank you so much, Francesco and Ed.
Will poke Bryan on the localization questions from now on.

Ed, +1 to enabling.

Comment 7

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/298bca8a48dc
There should be a Keyboard shortcut for the AI chat sidebar r=sidebar-reviewers,sclements,fluent-reviewers,flod,ngrato

Comment 8

[Norisz Fay [:noriszfay]]

Backed out for causing multiple dt failures

Backout link

Push with failures

Failure log // Failure log 2

Comment 9

[Ed Lee :Mardak]

devtools macos keyboard shortcut is cmd-alt-i whereas windows is ctrl-shift-i. so a general accel/ctrl-shift-i for chatbot conflicts on windows

should i make chatbot ctrl-alt-i on windows and cmd-shift-i macos (basically the opposite alt vs shift of web developer tools)? or find a different key

at a glance, the only time alt is used on windows is for ctrl-shift-alt-i for browser toolbox (more "advanced" devtools)

Comment 10

[Ed Lee :Mardak]

actually, looks like ctrl/cmd-e might be available? nevermind, cmd-e is some macos specific feature to put selected text to find in page and ctrl-e is search on windows for ie compatibility (in addition to cmd/ctrl-k)

cmd/ctrl-shift y or u or l seem available?

Comment 11

[mcortt]

Ctrl+Shift+I does nothing different than F12. Could you just replace it? If not, I believe Ctrl + Shift + F doesn't do anything on Windows. Though Cmd + Shift + F is Recents in Mac.

Comment 12

[Ed Lee :Mardak]

bolsson, is "L" good? we'll try ctrl-shift-l / cmd-shift-l to avoid using ctrl-alt-i on windows (as it seems like convention is to avoid alt as it's accessibility/menus)

i'll update the patch assuming yes but wait before trying to land again

Comment 13

[Bryan Olsson [:bolsson]]

(In reply to Ed Lee :Mardak from comment #12)

bolsson, is "L" good? we'll try ctrl-shift-l / cmd-shift-l to avoid using ctrl-alt-i on windows (as it seems like convention is to avoid alt as it's accessibility/menus)

i'll update the patch assuming yes but wait before trying to land again

No issues from an l10n perspective.

Comment 14

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/08df39c35f9d
There should be a Keyboard shortcut for the AI chat sidebar r=sidebar-reviewers,sclements,fluent-reviewers,flod,ngrato

Comment 15

[Norisz Fay [:noriszfay]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/08df39c35f9d

Comment 16

[tszentpeteri]

Backed out as requested by Mardak for causing 1927304.

• Backout link

Comment 17

[Ed Lee :Mardak]

bug 1927304 comment 5 suggests the other keyboard shortcuts suggested in comment 10 will not work either especially with the behavior to enable the feature and suggested the feature should allow for disabling the shortcut when enabled by default

perhaps we should go with the ctrl-alt-i / cmd-shift-i opposite alt/shift of devtools?

Comment 18

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

(In reply to Ed Lee :Mardak from comment #17)

bug 1927304 comment 5 suggests the other keyboard shortcuts suggested in comment 10 will not work either

Yup - Comment 10 suggested ctrl/cmd-shift y, u, l, none of which are available on my Ubuntu machine:

• Ctrl+Shift+y opens up Firefox's bookmarks/history "library" window.
• Ctrl+Shfit+u opens up a system-level UI to enter a special unicode character.
• Ctrl+Shift+l triggers the BitWarden autofill-password UI (per bug 1927304).

perhaps we should go with the ctrl-alt-i / cmd-shift-i opposite alt/shift of devtools?

For me at least, those keybindings don't seem to do anything & hence seem to be available. (I tested Ctrl+Alt+i on Win11 and Ubuntu, and Cmd+Shift+i on macOS.)

(Though: the fact that they're available means that surely some other extension or productivity tool has independently found them to be available and is using them, so we shouldn't coopt the keybinding except for users who've already got the AI sidebar enabled; and we should consider adding a setting to disable the keybinding for such users as well before default-enabling the feature, as alluded to in comment 17.)

Comment 19

[Ania]

Hi folks,
We did some in-depth look into available shortcuts in [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1897411](this ticket) and we ended up picking this combination for expanding sidebar:
Ctrl + Z (macOS)/ Ctrl + alt + Z (Linux and Windows)

Other open options that we can use for the chatbot panel include:
The only key combination that can be somewhat conveniently pressed with one hand:
Ctrl + X (macOS)/ Ctrl + alt + X (Windows/Linux)

The rest of the open key combinations are a little less convenient from the perspective of muscle memory:
Ctrl + C / Ctrl + alt + C
Ctrl + I / Ctrl + alt + I
Ctrl + J / Ctrl + alt + J
Ctrl + Q / Ctrl + alt + Q
Ctrl + W / Ctrl + alt + W
Ctrl + Y / Ctrl + alt +Y
Ctrl + U / Ctrl + alt + U

Comment 20

[hholst80]

Give just how important the AI functionality will be I see no reason why it could not be something like CTRL-Space?

Comment 21

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/85e2f9195dc0
There should be a Keyboard shortcut for the AI chat sidebar r=sidebar-reviewers,sclements,fluent-reviewers,flod,ngrato

Comment 22

[Sandor Molnar[:smolnar]]

Backed out for causing failures @ test_no_errors_clean_profile

Backout link: https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/ff6bebebdcdfbc438a1940b43de1f9a3d3bb1c4c

Push with failures

Failure log -> TEST-UNEXPECTED-FAIL | browser/components/tests/marionette/test_no_errors_clean_profile.py TestNoErrorsNewProfile.test_no_errors | AssertionError: Lists differ:

Comment 23

[Ed Lee :Mardak]

ania, there's a test that is failing: Key event not available on some keyboard layouts: key=“x” modifiers=“control,alt” id=“viewGenaiChatSidebarKb” and presumably prevents ctrl-alt-z too for sidebar bug 1897411

perhaps there's a reason why there's no "command,alt" keyboard shortcuts https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/search?q=control%2Calt

so potentially these need to be ctrl-shift-key as maybe alt isn't generally allowed for windows/linux? fwiw, ctrl-alt-x does function correctly on my windows vm when testing this out

Comment 24

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/b898aa2692c4
There should be a Keyboard shortcut for the AI chat sidebar r=sidebar-reviewers,sclements,fluent-reviewers,flod,ngrato

Comment 25

[Ed Lee :Mardak]

allowing the warning for now and reevaluating with bug 1936426

Comment 26

[amarc]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/b898aa2692c4

Comment 27

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

Since nightly and release are affected, beta will likely be affected too.
For more information, please visit BugBot documentation.

Comment 28

[Rares Doghi, Desktop QA]

Verified as fixed in our latest Nightly 135.0a1 (2024-12-11).